Graduate Teaching Assistantships in the UBC-Ritsumeikan Academic Exchange Program

You are invited to attend the plenary sessions of the SSHRC sponsored workshop, The intersection of language, learning and culture in early childhood: Home, school and community contexts that is being hosted in LLED as follows:

Thursday, May 2, 4:30-7:00PM
Dr Karen Martin, Southern Cross University, Australia
Title: Aboriginal children and families                                                            
Location: First Nations House of Learning

Dr. Martin presents a conceptual model of Indigenous early childhood education within the contexts of where young Aboriginal children live and learn, considering these as multiple rather than dual or binary. It also proposes these multiple contexts encompass the past, the present and the future and are comprised of the dimensions that are relational, cultural, political and spatial. It acknowledges that Western contexts are equally multiple and equally multi-dimensional and so the points and places where Aboriginal contexts and Western contexts interface are fragile and yet they are potentially the strongest points and places where transactions and transformations can, and do, occur. The conceptual model unpacks the nature and quality of these transactions and transformations regarding the teaching and learning of young Aboriginal children and the engagement of their families and communities

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Friday, May 3, 9:00-10:00AM 
Dr. Eve Gregory, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Title: TBA    
Location: First Nations House of Learning

Dr. Gregory is best known for her research with immigrant children and their families in East London, and particularly the role that extended family members play in language and literacy learning. Her publications include Learning to read in a new language: Making sense of words and worlds (Sage) and  City Literacies: Learning to read across generations and cultures (Routledge, 2000). Her most recent project is an ethnographic study of young  children’s language and literacy learning within the contexts of religious faiths in East London neighborhoods .

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Saturday, May 4, 9:00-10:00AM
Dr. Terezinha Nunes, Oxford University
Title: What is involved in modeling the world with mathematics?                                                     
Location: Digital Literacy Center

Mathematics is a tool for understanding the world and it should be available to everyone. In this presentation, the units of thinking for modeling the world with mathematics are identified as quantities, relations, and numbers. In the conceptualization of each of these elements, there are cultural variations and logical invariants. There is some degree of independence between children’s understanding of these three elements, and what is achieved first depends on how learning takes place.

The heuristic value of this analysis will be illustrated by considering children’s mathematical knowledge acquired in and out of school. When mathematical knowledge is developed mostly outside school, children’s understanding of quantities and relations between quantities is ahead of their number knowledge; their numerical manipulations are dependent on their understanding of quantities. When mathematical knowledge is developed predominantly in school, children’s skills in manipulating numbers are often disconnected from their understanding of quantities and relations between quantities; they are easily misled by superficial problem characteristics into choosing the wrong calculations to solve a problem.

Two important lessons from this analysis are that disparities in the understanding of quantities, relations and number are part of development and that schools could take on the role of promoting the coordination of these elements through teaching.

All welcome!

Date:
Thu, 05/02/2013 (All day) – Sat, 05/04/2013 (All day)

This year, the Department of Language and Literacy Education is hosting our Graduate Student Conference, Pushing the Frontiers of Language and Literacy, on May 25, 2013.

Plenary Sessions:
Dr. Kathleen Gallagher, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

Title:
Performing Literacy in Multi-Sited International Ethnographic Research

Professor Gallagher is Canada Research Chair in Theatre, Youth, and Research in Urban Schools, 2009 Winner of the Canadian Association of Women in Education (CASWE) and winner of the Outstanding Books in Curriculum Studies Award.

Dr. Diane Dagenais, Simon Fraser University

Professor Dagenais works in the Faculty of Education with scholarship situated in the field of applied linguistics.  Her research interests include language and learning in contexts of linguistic and cultural diversity as they relate to immigration, bilingualism, multilingualism, multiliteracies, second language and bilingual (immersion) education.

For more information, click here.

Date:
Sat, 05/25/2013 – 09:00 – 18:00